What we built at the weekend

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10 days ago we wrapped up the Geophysics Hackathon in Houston. I wrote a bit about it right after the event, but now I've gathered the evidence and can share more of the awesome. First of all — what did everyone build in the 2 days? 

Team 1: Velocity modelling in iOS

Essau Worthy-Blackwell (Southwestern Energy), Jacob Foshee (independent iOS dev), Evan Bianco (Agile), and Ben Bougher (independent, mostly helping Agile) built 2 tools exploring velocity modelling and depth conversion. One was a desktop tool (in Python), the other was an iOS app — watch this.

Team 2: LAS soup demux

Joe Jennings (Colorado School of Mines), Mike Stone (Lukoil), and Karl Schleicher (University of Texas at Austin) built a tool in Python for coping with messy data. Karl is a champion of open data, and needs a tool for quickly exploring large repositories. You can see their progress in the code in GitHub — feel free to help them out!

Team 3: A 1D forward model

Duncan Child (Spectraseis) joined Chris Chalcraft, Paul Garossino, and James Alison from OpenGeoSolutions to help out with his pumped up Java and JSON wrangling skills. Greg Partyka even popped in to help. Here is Blockfilter in GitHub.

Everyone's a winner

As well as being a fun way to get to know people, and create something new together, the event was a (very low key) contest. We had some experienced and perceptive judges to pick some winners and decide how the exactly 3 prizes would be distributed among the exactly 3 teams:

  • Team 3 were awarded with some Raspberry Pi starter kits, to recognize their solid idea, well-constructed code, and respect for work-life balance (hey, it was the weekend!). It was fun peeking over their shoulders occasionally.

  • Team 2 had the most commercially viable product, and as such went away with 2 books: The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, and Business Model Generation by Alex Osterwalder. Thanks to sponsor SURGE Accelerator, the team also won the chance to talk to a business mentor about their ideas.

  • Team 1 delivered the shiniest product at the end of the weekend, with the iOS app and a desktop clone. They each won one of Google's latest Nexus 7 tablets, to continue with their app-building skills.

What will you build?

Thanks again to the daredevils who showed up, the judges — especially Maitri Erwin, who helped out in lots of ways all weekend — and of course the sponsors: OpenGeoSolutions, Enthought, and dGB Earth Sciences. If you missed the event, dear reader, I hope you'll come along next time to share ideas, test workflows, and build new things.